are treated with learning and with ingenuity, but our limits do not allow us to follow the train of discourse. As little is it in our power, at present, to enter into the controversy which Mr. Thiersch's memoirs have excited, on that part of his theory in which he defends an original introduction of the Grecian art from Egypt and the East. In points of an antiquity so remote, as much commonly may be said on one side of the question as on the other, by men of learning and ingenuity; and not having before us the first memoir of Mr. Thiersch, we are the less prepared to enter into this discussion. Meantime we shall esteem ourselves most happy, should the remarks which we have now made have the effect of calling the attention of our readers more particularly, to the most beautiful branch of antiquarian study.

E. Everett,

ART. XI.-The Political State of Italy. By Theodore Lyman, jun. Boston, Wells & Lilly, 1820, 8vo, pp. 424.

It was formerly thought, that a gentleman, by the simple process of leaving his own country and going into a foreign one, acquired the right of forcing on the public an account of his breakfasts and nights' lodgings, of the various vulgar people he fell in with in the diligence and the inn, with all the insipid gossip of ordinary life. The mere circumstance of travelling was thought to give an importance to these precious details; and we were expected to buy and read a journal of small quotidian experiences, on the score of their having passed abroad, of which, had they passed at home and a man had proposed to speak to the public, his friends would have put him upon hellebore. Not only is this remark applicable to many of the elder travellers, but it is a scandal not yet effaced from English literature, that the Northern Summers and Strangers of Carr were once popular reading. But the public taste is certainly becoming more correct on this point; and although no discerning student of foreign countries will refuse any fact or detail however insignificant, so it be but characteristic; yet it is generally allowed now to be of no sort of consequence to the public, whether the traveller took a bad franc from the postillion, between St. Denys and Paris, or got a headach from his first indulgence in the cheap wines

of that capital; and the journals of travellers made up of these articles of information have, we believe, ceased to be in great demand, even at the circulating library.

There is another sort of travels which was also in great vogue in the last century, but is falling now into equal disrepute. The country treated of in the work before us suggests a striking example of the kind to which we allude: viz. the Travels of de la Lande in Italy; a sort of encyclopedia of all kinds of knowledge, which fall, by however remote an association, under the rubric of Italy, and strung together by the slender thread of a perigrination through the country, on the part of the author. That this work contains much valuable information nobody will deny; but we suppose it is one of the dullest books ever written. Notwithstanding the exalted and just reputation of de la Lande in his peculiar department, the accuracy of observation and the extent of general knowledge which he really possessed, can be seen in his inferring the mildness of the climate in the Milanese, from the growth of a fine palm-tree in the courts of the Ambrosian library: which palm-tree is, unfortunately for the argument, of brass; and the estimation in which these travels are held in the country best able to appreciate them may be learned from Monti's calling them a miserable perambulation.' The most honest book in this way is Reichard's Traveller,' which professes to be designed only as a guide-book on the road, and as such is probably the best in existence.

Lastly there is a sort of travels in Italy and Greece, of which the public is getting weary, for a more honourable cause indeed, but to the same effect; we mean the classical travels, and those which describe those countries in the connexion of classical associations, and of the remains of classical antiquity. The books in this way, at least as far as Greece is concerned, are now so good, that we think nothing further of that kind need be attempted. Were the popularity of a work a sure test of its merit, the same might have been said with respect to Eustace's Italy. But recent literary history contains few examples more melancholy of the instability of human things, than the fate of this work; and as every traveller, who returns from Italy, bears fresh testimony to its extravagance and its errors, and as all candid readers were from the first offended with its excess of sectarian and political zeal, it is falling as rapidly as it rose; a fate to have been expected for

a book wrought out, in the leisure of a university, as we have been credibly informed, from very imperfect notes taken on a hasty transit through the country, with few of the qualifications enjoined on the traveller, in the introduction to the work. Still however Italy has been, well or ill, so often described in reference to its ancient remains and works of art, that we think no great interest could be excited for a book of travels that should dwell principally upon them

The only sort of travels, that will, we think, hereafter be much sought for, are those which in fact, though written by travellers, are, if we may venture on a paradoxical phrase, no travels at all; that is, the remarks of persons of observation in foreign countries, wholly unincumbered with details of stage-coaches and post-chaises, and common travellers' gossip, and leaving it quite to the reader's imagination to conceive by what conveyances and after what adventures, the author arrives at the spot where his observations commence. And even when there arrived, the political interest is so fast absorbing all others both at home and abroad, and the classical soil has been so thoroughly trod. and we have such maps and views, and catalogues of galleries and museums, that if we mistake not a greater curiosity will hereafter be felt on topics of statistical and political information, on the condition, pursuits, and manners of the people, than on pictures, statues, and ruins.

The work before us is of the description we allude to, containing the author's observations on a class of subjects limited in their range, connected more or less intimately with the politics and statistics, and the state of manners of several parts of Italy, treated with a detail and accuracy, which show that these topics were made the object of diligent inquiry and investigation on the spot; and wholly unincumbered with the common lore of turnpike roads and hotels. This seems to us at once the dictate of good taste and fairness, for it is really little better than a fraud on the public, to force upon them under the cover of the names of France, Italy, and Greece what after all has no sort of importance but as having happened to the individual traveller.

The title of Mr. Lyman's work will not perhaps convey to the reader an idea of its whole contents. A portion of the chapters only, as the third, sixth, thirteenth, sixteenth, twenty first, and thirty second chapters can be strictly called

political in their subject. Other parts refer to statistics and finance, belonging rather to political economy than politics technically used. In addition to these, there are several chapters devoted to the manners, customs, and institutions of different parts of the country. In consequence of the miscellaneous nature of the subjects treated, it was not easy to fix on a title which would expressly comprehend them all. That which is chosen, though subject to the exceptions we have stated, sufficiently answers the apparent design of the author, viz: to indicate his work as one devoted not to antiquarian and classical topics, but those of a political interest.*

The parts of Italy principally treated are the Ecclesiastical and Neapolitan States. There are, however, several chapters in which the author has collected his observations with respect to the country at large; and the appendix contains considerable statistical information with respect to Tuscany, Piedmont, and Genoa. The part of Italy of which the least is said is the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom; an omission accounted for, in the advertisement to the work, from the want of public printed documents, and the extreme jealousy of the Austrian functionaries.

No person we think can read Mr. Lyman's book, without feeling in a very sensible degree, the unhappy situation of our American literature for want of that useful class of citizens, known in England as book-makers; artists profoundly skilled in the mystery of section and paragraph; who can take the observations and facts of gentleinen and throw them into books and chapters, in the most scientific form; who can spread out a small matter over a large surface, and know how to fashion the size of the book, not according to the amount of the materials but the popularity of the subject treated; and can tell just how much the public will bear upon any given topic. In the hands of an artisan of this class, Mr. Lyman's book would have assumed a very different form

• We may observe, by the way, that it is no doubt a similar sense which is to be given to the word political, applied to the long trochaic lines of the modern Greek versification. Their being adapted to political topics in the common sense of political, is a ground for the name not existing in fact. They are also called d'amorizoi by Eustathius (II. p. 27. Ed. Polit.) and we are inclined to agree with Salvinus in his note to this passage of Eustathius, that both Tidy and xovov are intended in this application, to express the reverse of παλαιόν.

New Series, No. 5.

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from that in which it now appears. Much less than a large quarto it could not well have filled. We can fancy many improvements, which would unquestionably have been made, in the order of the chapters; and as for paragraphs and clauses, there is no knowing what a skilful pen might have done for them. Facts, and dates, and sums, often set down, as it should appear, under their respective heads, in no other order than that, in which they had originally offered themselves to the author's observation, would have been marshalled out in a logical succession, rising from small to great, or shading off from generals to particulars; and instead of the perplexing confusion of a native landscape would have presented us with the beautiful regularity of a Dutch garden. Seriously however, though we think but meanly of this formal and scientific finish in a work of the kind of that before us; and though we are sure that nothing sooner excites the disgust of judicious readers than to witness a pedantic precision in this respect, yet we think the great objects of all writing, to communicate distinct ideas, would have been better attained by Mr. Lyman, by more care in the divisions of his work; and by throwing distinctly under one head all that belongs to Italy in general, and under others all that belongs respectively to the Roman, Neapolitan, or other separate states. The style also runs frequently into the extreme of plainness, and from a desire in itself laudable, to avoid a tedious exuberance, is occasionally so brief, elliptical, and abrupt, as to be obscure. The consequence of this falls grievously upon the dilletanti at large, particularly upon the class of light readers, and we speak it feelingly the reviewers. In general, by the grace of a copious index, by grand divisions in large capitals, and subdivisions in small capitals, and a well-organized free-masonry of book and chapter, it is by no means necessary to read a work to find what is in it. You read the table of contents and the index, and turn over the rest: the body of the book being like the stone of an East Indian mango, a kind of horny dry kernel, on which the pulp reposes. The work before us, unluckily perhaps for its popularity, is of a different class. It is necessary to read it, to find out what is in it. The objection, which Madame de Stäel makes to the structure of a German period viz: that it is impossible to tell what a sentence means in German till you hear it through, applies singularly well to Mr. Lyman's work. For